Melanie Phillips tells it like it is on the subject of the NHS and the Baby P scandal

January 8, 2013

Well worth reading in full. Here is an excerpt. Hopefully a particular RL friend of mine will read it and they will see where I’m coming from regarding my objections to the conflict of interest in the State both paying for healthcare and being the major provider of it. Any private sector business that, like Stafford Hospital, killed 1200 of its customers would be out of business. Maybe it is time to put the NHS out of business and replace it with something that works and doesn’t kill its customers.

“Far from engendering altruism, the Welfare State has all but destroyed it. Altruism comes from acting against one’s own self-interest in a spirit of vocation.

But the Welfare State has created a culture of entitlement. In the NHS, this has fostered an attitude among many staff that patients should be grateful for what they get. That, in turn, has encouraged a resentment which dehumanises those whose needs are seen as overwhelming.

This is seen most starkly in the systematic ill-treatment and neglect of elderly and incapable patients.

In social services, meanwhile, the obsession with equality has replaced professionalism with a paralysing political correctness. The result is that when ethnic or sexual minorities commit abuses, these offences are invariably ignored.

The Welfare State — and most particularly the NHS — is seen as the ultimate example of compassion. In fact, it leaves patients and clients powerless, while protecting and even rewarding gross incompetence, and worse, by staff.

That’s why inquiry after inquiry follows scandal after scandal. And it’s why reform of the kind demanded by this week’s Francis report is not possible without a far more fundamental change of approach.

The Government must stop bowing down to the sacred cow of the NHS and rethink the basis of the Welfare State if care services are to become, in the Health Secretary’s words, ‘worthy of a civilised country’.

Altruism and compassion have to be, once again, enabled rather than stifled.”